Albus again/ Chapter 29 ???s/ Snape DADA / Albus Memory Charm / Snape DADA

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 184416

Catlady: 
> > My memory is awful. When did an Inferius pop up in front of our
noses and we didn't recognize it?
> 
> Zara:
> DH. Most of us, anyway, did not realize that Bathilda was an
animated corpse under the control of a Dark Wizard until Nagini came
writing out of her neck (ick).
>
Carol responds:
But was Bathilda's corpse an Inferius? My impression was that Nagini
was inhabiting/possessing the corpse, able to beckon and walk clumsily
but not to remove items from shelves, start a fire, etc. (not to
mention clean house!) and, of course, she spoke only Parseltongue--not
something an Inferius could do. I think that Nagini, not Voldemort,
was controlling Bathilda's corpse, and the ruse worked only because
Bathilda was very old and known to be senile. I don't think that an
Inferius could have followed Hermione and Harry, recognizing them
through their behavior (and perhaps Harry by his smell) despite the
Polyjuice disguise and, later, the Invisibility Cloak, which Nagini's
snake senses apparently enabled her to see through, and then lured
them to Bathilda's house, keeping Harry with her and Hermione
downstairs. Nagini, snake though she is, is a remarkably intelligent
animal (wicked, of course, and connected to Voldemort through being a
Horcrux, but able to think for herself, as Dumbledore pointed out when
he first mentioned the possibility of her being a Horcrux and as we
saw in OoP when she attacked Mr. Weasley in Harry's vision. Of course,
Voldemort may have put some sort of spell on Bathilda's corpse to keep
it from rotting, and the Aurors who found it discovered signs of
(unspecified) Dark magic, but the corpse was not running around
murdering people (or lying quietly in wait in a cold, dark place)
after Nagini abandoned it. It's unclear whether she inhabited the
corpse the whole time between Bathilda's death and Harry and
Hermione's visit. Maybe she left it at night to hunt. She must have
been under orders not to eat Bathilda for any reason (and probably she
preferred live or fresh-killed prey in any case).

The only Inferi we definitely encounter are the ones in the cave in
HBP, which behave very differently from Nagini!Bathilda.

Carol, for whom Nagini emerging from the neck of Bathilda's corpse was
much more shocking, horrifying, and revolting than Harry's ordeal with
the Inferi in HBP